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Thursday, 14 March 2013

Garmisch then and now; a lesson in long term memory

Garmisch revisited:
One of the essay topics we used to give students for their final exam
was ‘if you could travel to any time, past or future, what time would you
choose, and why?’

Reading the essays, I’d think about how I would have
answered the question, and I'd always think of Garmisch. That’s where I’d choose to go! Garmisch, around 1980. After school, when my friends all went to university, I wanted to travel instead. Somehow, I ended up in Garmisch. Instead of
getting a degree, I spent three years working in a hotel, learning German, and skiing (see pic below from 1981!)

skiing on Zugspitz, April 1981

For the past 30 plus years, I’ve dreamed of going back to
ski in Garmisch, or, to give it its full name, Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Once I realized I could make it happen this year, I tried to stop myself from having unrealistic expectations. What if I was
disappointed? What if it had changed
unrecognizably? Would all my memories be
spoiled? That must happen sometimes when people re-visit a place from their
past. But, this turned out not to be one of those times.

Zugspitz March 2013, almost the same view!

21 again? On arrival,
the hotel staff complimented me on my German, and asked where I’d learned
it. Here, I said. I used to live here. And then I thought to myself, ‘before you were born.’ None of them looked over 30; their
whole lives had taken place during the time since I last spoke German. You'd think this would have made me feel old; instead, I had the distinct feeling that, like Benjamin Button, I was growing younger by the minute. Garmisch was working its magic! It wasn’t
long before I was pretty convinced that I was 21 again. My legs were happy to cooperate with this age change; after a hard day’s skiing, I still had unlimited energy to go
walking all over town. Five days in a
row.

I used to work at a hotel on this street

But, of course, not everything was the same. In 1981, I used to ski until 2 p.m., work
until 10 p.m., and then go out to the disco where my friends and I would dance
all night to ‘Billy Jean’, ‘Brick house’, 'Staying alive', ‘Play that funky music’, and ‘Don’t
stop til you get enough.' I
decided to make no attempt to replicate this particular activity from my past, (suspecting anyway that I was unlikely to find, in 2013, a disco playing the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever).

Skiing: How has skiing changed? Well, chair lifts have been added to, or in some cases replaced, T-bars. The cable cars are still the same, but talking on mobile phones has replaced smoking as the preferred way to pass the time on the ride up the
mountain. Ski passes now look like
credit cards and have a contactless chip; you put it in an inside pocket
and forget about it. So much better than
the old paper kind you had to hang on your jacket zip and show every
time you got on the lift.

I didn’t mind going skiing alone then, nor did I mind it
this time. Then, of course, I was a
‘local’, so I would always run into someone I knew on the slopes. We’d ski together for a bit, until one of us
had to go to work, or until we ran into other people we knew and went off in different directions. This time I was visitor, an outsider, so no chance of meeting up with a local ski buddy. But, (always look on the bright side) I didn’t have to leave the slopes at 1:30 to go wait tables!

Views: The views from
the ski slopes haven’t changed. What
has changed is my appreciation for them. I barely noticed them before; I was only interested in skiing fast,
experiencing that adrenaline rush, keeping up with my ski patrol friends.

Wandering through the streets of town during my afternoon
walks, I realized how much I'd taken the beauty and grandeur of the alpine landscape for granted when I lived there. Mountain views are everywhere, in every direction, and for everyone, because there are no high rise buildings in Garmisch. I guess living under the Alpspitz and
Zugspitz is like everything else – you don’t notice what you are used to.

My lesson in long term memory retrieval came when I saw the Horn sign. In the ‘old days’, the Horn was the black run I was always getting into difficulty on, the
most challenging run on the mountain. I came across it on the morning of the second day. Up to that point, I hadn’t remembered the names of any of the runs; I'd lost my ‘mental map’ of the mountain.
However, once I saw the sign saying Horn with the black diamond,
everything came back. The way down. The names of the other runs. The layout of the mountain. Random German words and phrases. Songs. And, people.
People I hadn't thought about in years.
All these appeared by magic in my mind as if a switch had been
turned on. The experience was so
powerful that I’ve been thinking about memory ever since, and how to harness its potential to improve language learning and acquisition for my students.

By the way, if any of my skiing friends are reading this --
I didn’t go down the Horn; I thought
about it though! There was a sign saying
Lebensgefahr (literally ‘life danger’!) A couple of kids, who looked about 10, ignored the sign and zoomed on past. In 1981, I’d probably have followed them, thinking ‘if they can do it, so can
I.’ But, not now. I have to make some
concessions to middle age.

If you ever get the chance to visit Garmisch, go! It's a beautiful, happy, magical place; I’m so
glad that I went back as part of my sabbatical adventures. Although I had thought it
might make me feel old, revisiting the neighborhoods and ski slopes of my youth; it didn't. It made me feel young.